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Your cancer research funding at work (attacking the Tea Party)

Your cancer research funding at work (attacking the Tea Party)

What “medical research” will look like in the age of Obamacare

Had I but world enough and time, I would write something original about the sickeningly stupid argument that the Tobacco industry and Koch brothers began planning for the Tea Party movement over a decade ago and long before anyone had even thought up the Stimulus and Obamacare legislation which actually sparked the movement in 2009-2010.

The theory was developed because a study funded by the National Cancer Institute found that the Tobacco industry and Koch brothers advocated and organized for limited government, and even used the term Tea Party.  Because, as we all know, before the Tobacco industry and Koch brothers advocated for limited government and used the term Tea Party, no one had ever done that in the entire history of the United States.

It is so stupid, and such an abuse of taxpayer funding, that one would have hoped it would die in the laboratory, but it was just the sort of crackpot theory to which the left-blogosphere inevitably would be drawn.  And it has.

But since I don’t have world enough and time, I’ll quote from the post by Hans Bader (a sometimes guest contributor to Legal Insurrection and College Insurrection) at Openmarket.org, Shades Of McCarthyism: Federal Government Funds Smear Campaigns On Tea Party, Kochs:

A government-funded study — paid for by the National Cancer Institute! — says (ridiculously) that Big Tobacco and Koch brothers created the Tea Party. The study is now being parroted by Al Gore. The study is based on strange reasoning, such as the fact that one group funded in small part by tobacco companies used the word “Tea Party” in passing in 2002, a group largely unrelated to the groups that later came into being and used it in 2009. (Because, obviously, no one had ever used the words “Tea Party” before the 21st century.) Never mind that much of America’s non-profits get money from tobacco companies, which fund countless causes, such as arts funding, domestic violence shelters, and non-profits across the political spectrum — the family behind Lorillard Tobacco is famously liberal and donates to liberal politicians. But Al Gore trumpets the study, relying on its taxpayer-funded status to buttress its credibility:

A new study by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Medicine reveals that the Tea Party Movement was planned over a decade ago by groups with ties to the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. The movement was not a spontaneous populist uprising, but rather a long-term strategy to promote the anti-science, anti-government agenda of powerful corporate interests.

As the Huffington Post notes, this “study” was “funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health.” The federal government has become so politicized that it can even use money intended for cancer research to demonize the administration’s critics. Here’s a link to the government-funded study by left-wing activists Stanton Glantz and Amanda Fallin. “Co-author, Amanda Fallin, PhD, RN, adds: ‘The records indicate that the Tea Party has been shaped by the tobacco industry, and is not a spontaneous grassroots movement at all.’” The reasoning is based on associating the Tea Party not only with groups that used the word “Tea Party” at some point in time, but also with completely different groups that existed back in the 1980s and didn’t use “Tea Party” terminology at all, but merely happened to share their opposition to big government. As syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum notes, the study argues that supporting “private property rights, consumer choice and limited government” can make you a tobacco-industry tool regardless of whether you get any tobacco money or not. He quotes from the study:

“Echoing well-established tobacco industry arguments and the patriotic rhetoric of the [industry-backed] smokers’ rights groups, they argued for private property rights, consumer choice and limited government.”

According to Glantz et al., then, supporting private property rights, consumer choice, and limited government makes you objectively pro-tobacco, whether or not you are getting any money from cigarette manufacturers. After all, those are “well-established industry arguments.” Likewise, if you oppose ObamaCare, you are doing the bidding of Big Tobacco, even if you don’t realize it.

Despite the study’s logical leaps, the Huffington Post ate it up: “A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene. . .The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party’s anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes.”

Your tax dollars at work! Whatever government bureaucrat funded this “study” doubtless took solace in the fact that this kind of thing is rewarded by the Obama administration.

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Comments

This is what scholarship looks like in the age of Obama.

    legalizehazing in reply to Bruno Lesky. | February 15, 2013 at 12:03 pm

    Exactly my thoughts. What a pathetic sham. That’s not academic or scientific. I would not even say it was a 3rd rate blog hack job.

    I’m a firm believer that virtually everybody, who worked at the Tobacco Institute, now works on Climate Change research.
    The pattern of torturing the data until it yields the results that were wanted continues.

      Neo in reply to Neo. | February 15, 2013 at 12:35 pm

      Fully disclosure: I worked with a PhD statistician back in the 80’s who told me that the “dream job” for a PhD statistician was to work for the Tobacco Institute.

    I track the USDA pretty close, due to my job as an analyst in agriculture. Vilsack is as principled as Obama when it comes to data. One of the USDA’s programs proposed by Vilsack was reviewed by a team of economists and was presented to Congress. It was a Carbon Cap and Trade thing. The conclusion of the economist panel was the proposal of Vilsack would lead to Aforestation of the US great plains. Aforestation, the planting of forest where none existed before. Sec of Ag Tom Vilsack’s response… “Go back and run the numbers again!”

    They ran them again and guess what…no Aforestation!

    Ray Bradbury was asked if his book “Farenheit 451” could be republished with PC tweaks and language softening. His response. “There is more than one way to burn a book”.

As never before, Obama has shown he will politicize every possible thing.

Oh, and Collectivists lie. It is how they wake up in the morning, and how they lay down at night. They hate and cannot abide sound science and rational thinking.

Like I said the media are storytellers of the left – offer their media fiction as fact. A bunch of retoolers that serve the Mouther-in-Chief.

Now we need to make up our own fiction, let’s see, “Obama was paid for by a Saudi man who got him into top schools and paid for his education” – oh wait – that at least is true.

http://tinyurl.com/7xw5tah

this is what gets me, when someone (a foreign entity) funds media matters its good.
when someone (a US entity) supposedly funds an opposing group its bad.

theduchessofkitty | February 15, 2013 at 10:54 am

Meanwhile, cancer patients have been dying… because there wasn’t enough money allocated for finding treatments or cures.

You can see stuff like this (using money allocated for one “noble cause” in order to defame some kind of dissent) happening only in dictatorships.

Something I read earlier in the week from 2006 was explaining the mindset of community organizing and how and why it seeks to gain power. The point was to gain control of political institutions or force those who control them to listen to you.

This is the mindset of community organizing but this time it has the federal treasury to use to go after political opponents.

We are dealing here with rule-redefining politics that involve seeking a Metamorphosis of the role of the state and the entire concept of the legitimacy of the individual in this country. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/we-are-at-the-historical-stage-for-the-emergence-of-one-particular-new-kind-of-person/

Theories now exist not to be true but to gain implementation using political institutions to then change what people believe, what they value, and even the ability to think at all. All of this is under fire because we are dealing with an organized attempt to shift to a Common Good for the majority orientation. Just yesterday I was able to find a report from one of the principal’s involved with this shift to a Systems Thinking, planned society admitting that the theory was grounded in a rejection of the Technico-Rationalist mind.

That kind of rejection should not be within the purview of any elected official or bureaucrats. The Tea Party exists because enough people still remember enough history to recognize the Individual has no legitimacy where political power now knows no real boundaries.

David H. Koch is the 1st mentioned, primary sponsor of NOVA on PBS.

    Ragspierre in reply to secondwind. | February 15, 2013 at 11:59 am

    Yeah, it’s almost like he supports science or something…

    The Koch brothers are benefactors in a lot of areas, including the arts. Kinda like they care about the culture…

      theduchessofkitty in reply to Ragspierre. | February 15, 2013 at 12:21 pm

      Yep. The Koch brothers are big supporters of the arts and culture.

      But if I were their closest adviser, I’d tell them to follow the idea put forward by Professor Reynolds. Invest your money in more worthy endeavors – buy a few women’s magazines and a few media sources, thus directly or indirectly influencing the culture.

        I agree, but also know it would have to be done via a shadow buyer.

        Openly conservative or libertarian buyers would be refused, as we have seen in the past.

Insufficiently Sensitive | February 15, 2013 at 11:44 am

We can just imagine what a bonanza the leftist propaganda insustry received after the first, merely 850 billion dollar, Stimulus bill was enacted in early 2009. Talk about slush funds, the Democrats will need no others for decades – although, need or not, they’re making hay with taxpayer dollars while the sun-king Obama shines, as this ‘cancer’ study shows.

We would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those darn kids.

Who knew Rick Santelli was a Koch Brother? Santelli doesn’t sound Dutch.

Not only is the Federal Government demonizing people who disagree with its policies, it forces them to pay for it.

So logically, Obama, a smoker with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry, must have planned the formation of the Tea Party movement while puffing away.

Over at Nofrakkingconcensus, Donna Laframbosie denuded the left ignorance of all they are crowing about in this “study”. Seems that Al Gore and the whining bunch at the World Wildlife Fund are deep into the pockets of “Big Tobacco”.

But I’m almost sure we’ll hear about that soon. I’m nearly positive.

http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/02/11/about-those-tobacco-connections/

How’s this different from the “studies” of “right-wing extremists” that pop up from various government groups? It’s just more pseudo-scholarship intended to ease what little conscience the left has as they truck us off to the camps.

(Ever notice how those studies say the same things, in the same ways, cite the same “sources”?)

BannedbytheGuardian | February 15, 2013 at 5:32 pm

Lance Armstrong’s histrionics gave him a $500 million empire to influence outcomes in his impeccable tyrannical sociopathic manner.

Napoleon on a bicycle with yellow wristbanded camp followers galore running amok from sea to shining sea.

I thought to put Hitler on the saddle but unlike Hitler , Napoleons did some good.

Do I still get a Godwin gong?

People exposed to communism and socialism are at high risk for suffering slavery, torture, and murder. In the 20th century alone, nearly 100 million lives were lost to left-wing lunatics suffering from delusions of grandeur. Over the same period, several 100 million lives were lost to left-wing dreams of eugenics, abortion, “reproductive rights”, and other voluntary and involuntary commissions of generational genocide.

To reduce your risk of suffering from civil and human rights violations, it is necessary to respect individual dignity, recognize an intrinsic value of human life, and reject ideologies designed to consolidate capital and control in the hands of a minority through redistributive and retributive change schemes. Only individuals incapable of self-moderating behavior should choose to exchange their liberty for submission with benefits, especially when this compromise sponsors corruption of individuals, culture, and society.

[…] scapegoat the Koch brothers for seemingly everything, with no basis in reality.  Now they are falsely claiming that the Tea Parties are just a front for the tobacco companies and the Koch brothers […]

[…] » Your cancer research funding at work (attacking the Tea Party) – Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion […]

[…] Your cancer research funding at work (attacking the Tea Party) […]

I suspect at least one bureaucrat got a bonus and/or promotion for inventive thinking.

[…] comments disagreeing with the study are not from regular Huffington Post readers, but from disgusted readers of other blogs or conservative or libertarian websites that linked to The Huffington Post […]

[…] (Later comments disagreeing with the study are not from regular Huffington Post readers, but from disgusted readers of other blogs or conservative or libertarian websites that linked to The Huffington Post […]

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